I wasn’t worried—until my doctor asked if I was sitting down.
Earlier that week, I’d gone in to follow up on an abnormal Pap smear. I’d put screening off for a few years during the pandemic. She took a few small biopsies, but it didn’t feel urgent. In the past, any abnormal results I had soon cleared up. I’d even had a LEEP, a common procedure to remove precancerous cells from the cervix, in my 20s and moved on with my life.
When she called with the biopsy results, I expected, at worst, a small inconvenience. Another procedure. A light chiding for my delay.
Instead, she told me I had cancer.
Cervical cancer is often described as preventable. It’s usually caused by HPV, a sexually transmitted virus nearly 85% of people will contract in their lifetime, but which rarely progresses to cancer with regular screening and vaccination.
After my diagnosis, those facts felt like an indictment. I replayed the skipped appointments. The voice that said, You’ll reschedule next month. I thought: If this kills me, it will be because I didn’t take it seriously enough.
Spoiler: I did not die. Today, I am gratefully two years cancer-free. But once women in my life knew my story, they began sharing their own with me—and I got a window into how common it is to fall behind on Paps, panic over abnormal results, and keep questions about cervical health to yourself.
What I’ve come to understand is that none of us are reckless. We’re just trying to navigate a risk the medical establishment doesn’t explain well, that’s strangely hard to talk about and often feels abstract, until it isn’t.
So I sat down with my gynecologic oncologist, Amy McNally, MD, at Minnesota Oncology, to separate myth from reality and unpack what she wishes every person with a cervix understood.
Myth 1: Cervical cancer is rare.
Before my diagnosis, I could name exactly one person I knew who had been diagnosed with cervical cancer: an aunt in the 1990s. My mom, a nurse for decades, had never cared for a single cervical cancer patient. I genuinely believed it was something that just didn’t happen anymore.
And in the US, it is relatively uncommon—about 14,000 new cases a year, a fraction compared to the more than 300,000 cases of breast cancer. But worldwide, cervical cancer remains the fourth most common cancer in women, with deaths concentrated in countries where screening is harder to access.
